"Surely the church "on its hillock" is St Godric's and not, as you said, St Oswald's which is in Church Street," said Dorothy. She is, of course, correct.

Thomas also questioned our wintry picture captioned "Fine Tifters". It showed Durham School boys in September 1962 wearing fine headgear. "I was not aware that we had a fall of snow in September 1962," he said.

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On the rear of the picture is written one date – September 14, 1962 – which was when the picture was used in The Northern Echo.

It appeared to illustrate an article written by Canon HK Luce, the headmaster of the school from 1932-58, headlined "Public schools must open their doors", and, tellingly it has been deliberately cropped at the boys' waists.

Therefore the reader in 1962 could not see that there was snow on the ground.

This suggests that Thomas is correct – the picture was an old one that was reused to illustrate the 1962 article, but we have no idea when it was taken.

And then Colin Johnson emailed to draw attention to another mistake. "Your caption says "fine tifters"," says Colin, "but my father would say to me "where's your titfer", which comes from the Cockney rhyming slang where "titfer-tat" meant "hat"."

Colin is also correct: tit and tat are small blows which people have traded since at least 1556 and which Cockneys adopted for their own, strange vocabulary.

Finally, the picture we have been using of Maggie Reece's sweetshop in Durham originated with the Gilesgate Archive, which should have been acknowledged.

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